legalienate

Monday, March 19, 2018

The U.S. corporate media has been waxing nearly hysterical about the "risk" of
having a political neophyte like Trump doing direct diplomacy with the government of North Korea.One breathless talking head recently exclaimed that Trump doesn't
understand that de-nuclearization is only supposed to apply to North
Korea, not to U.S. nukes on the Korean peninsula.
USA nukes good!, Commie nukes bad!
This is the "sophisticated" understanding of international affairs that
Trump is said to lack.Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton continues to attack Trump voters for being economically and politically "backward," while she represents the "progressive" values of coastal elites leading us to a bright future over the protests of the dumb masses.As long as these continue to be the (Pavlovian) responses of the president's "opposition," we can look forward to eight years of Trump in the White House.The clown running the circus is the best U.S. democracy money can buy.

Monday, February 26, 2018

“A cabal of anti-Trump fanatics cooked up the
Russia collusion story, and don't-rock-the-boat bureaucrats went along with it,
so we now have a behemoth investigative monster chasing unicorns.”

Ann Coulter

When an
economic Cro-Magnon can make what passes for a left in America look like political
Neanderthals, you know we’ve got big problems. The rush to passionately embrace
the “Russiagate” story is only one, though a big one, of the moves of what was
once called a liberal progressive segment of the american people so far to the
right that mad dog conservatives are fighting to maintain their position as
least logical pretenders to sanity. What is going on here?

A system so
dangerously troubled that its dominating minority is losing control fast enough
to warrant radical message changing to its subjects thereby causing
irrationality to rule more blatantly than ever before.

Decent
people have always known that poverty is an aspect of reality that should be
changed but market forces, god and whatever other supernatural powers could be blamed
made it impossible so the only thing to do was to be kind to the poor, maybe pray
for them and send an occasional check to charity and all would be as well as
possible. But the appalling and growing inequality rampant in a capitalist
dominated market system has made poverty so frighteningly obvious among a
former middle class sinking dangerously close to that status itself that the
information flow must reflect excuses that explain away the social conditions.

Sun spots
were once used as a potential rationale to explain the economic forces of a
stock market and as such were no more or less logical than the religious-scientific
belief in the buying and selling that relies on investments made by a tiny
segment of a population, all of which would ultimately create the best possible
world for almost everyone. Alleged primitive people who danced around a fire to
bring rain or wore animal bones to ward off illness were more in touch with the
universe and the powers of nature than many civilized types sporting degrees in
quantifiable spectroscopic economic scat gathering who pose and are accepted as
experts in market analysis. Living in a time which has seen the inequality gap
between humans grow wider than ever in fairly reliable history while trillions
of dollars of wealth are spent on warfare and hundreds of billions on pet care
is likely to provoke more thought than usual about the alleged wisdom of such a
system. Thus, reality tv, american politics, marvel comics and other fantasy
productions to keep the remaining solvent sector occupied with the status of
special identity groups and kept divided from one another enough to protect the
wealthiest from any chance that unified democratic action might threaten their
dominating role.

A generation
ago conservative anti-Russian-communist fanatics made some liberal types smirk
at their backward and narrow-minded political stance but that has now been
adopted by progressive anti-Russian-capitalist fanatics swept up in the farce
called Russiagate. This dementia-based view finds an American oligarchy of
billionaires ruling a minority of the electorate into voting for the capitalist
party with two slightly differing factions and calling that “our democracy”. At
beating our minds into such mush it now claims that Putin and Russia are
somehow responsible for the electoral college and alienated just enough Americans
in a disintegrating system to be swept up in fervor for things facebooked next
to photos of our dogs, cats and lunch that allegedly “meddled” in our sacred
electoral process. A handful of bumbling Russian financial hustlers picked up dumb
items from anti-social American media and furthered their entry into semi-empty
American heads. OMG! To think that any foreign power in our wonderful globalized
economy would have an interest in another nation’s political economic life is
so far fetched it makes american meddling in foreign politics seem, uh,
fictional? The Russian wino who led that nation into near disaster was a
creature of American foreign policy and the Putin regime has led that nation
from capitalist total disaster to only regular capitalist disaster, which is
far more than can be said about the present American gang and its recent
predecessors.

It’s as
though the sinking Titanic crew and passengers were forced into concentrating
on who the captain was and how many gay Latinos, Jewish transsexuals, white
supremacists or black female impersonators were working in the kitchen while
the water approached their lungs and all lifeboats had already left. We may not
have reached that moment yet but at the rate things are moving and the near
complete vanishing of a real american anti-capitalist left, it could be here
sooner than anyone might wish. Opposition to Trump is important but really no
more so than opposition to any CEO of a major corporation could be, but the
business is the problem and not it’s chief clerk, bookkeeper or toilet cleaner,
no matter how personally pinheaded, egomaniacal or TV famous. And Trump is
opposed by the ruling power oligarchs of America and was never supposed to be
able to gain his position as powerful figurehead with less power than the
figures who own him. But as long as this “new left” takes on the work of the
“old right”, the conditions of capitalist America will get worse and bring on
material tragedies much bigger than a single oaf, or a single oafish identity
group, might be able to fathom. Stop Trump’s worst possibilities, of course,
but the worst possibilities of murderous, anti-human and perversely anti-social
capitalism are far bigger problems for humanity and must be dealt with by a
movement that goes far beyond celebrity leadership personalities and deals with
political economic substance by creating radical systemic change. At this sad
point, what passes for an American left is a major part of the problem and
hardly anywhere near offering a solution.

Saturday, February 17, 2018

-----member of the audience to Derrick Jensen after one of his talks (quoted by Jensen in End Game, Vol. 1)

Derrick Jensen is a radical environmentalist and prolific author, who has been called the poet-philosopher of the ecological movement. In 2008 he was named one of Utne Reader's fifty visionaries who are changing the world. Among his many books are A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, Endgame, What We Left Behind, and Resistance against Empire. His central thesis is that "the dominant culture is killing the planet," and we need to build a "culture of resistance" that includes blowing up dams and cell phone towers because "what we're doing isn't working." (Democracy Now, November 26, 2010)

Jensen is to be commended for reminding us that the world is run by force, not by voluntary interaction in a "free market" dedicated to delivering the greatest good for the greatest number. Nevertheless, while believing himself to be an intelligent dissident advancing a sensible argument, he demonstrates an uncritical acceptance of the establishment view of WWII, repeatedly lapsing into dogmatic assertions about Hitler and the "Final Solution" in order to establish a basis of comparison with the U.S., which he then condemns for Nazi-like behavior on an even larger than Hitlerian scale. The central preoccupation of his book "End Game" (Vol. 1) is elaborating an argument for "bringing down" civilization by any means necessary, in order that imperiled humanity may return to indigenous ways of living that proved themselves sustainable for thousands of years.

Unfortunately, the book is shot through with sloppy thinking, adolescent bravado, and snotty asides, while overlooking the fact that trying to "bring down" civilization today is like dedicating oneself to sinking the Titanic - right after it hit the iceberg. Jensen sees civilization as purely destructive, claiming that it leads inevitably to “assembly-line mass murder”
as at Auschwitz.There is, he insists, an
inherent logic that leads inevitably to “the electrified fences, the gas chambers,
the bullets in the brain.” He evinces no trace of skepticism of this
extravagant thesis, in spite of its flimsy factual basis, but merely blunders ahead to declare, with exaggerated self-importance, that he has an “intense opposition to
genocide,” thus contrasting himself favorably with the pathological multitudes he presumes are lukewarm or indifferent to mass killing.

Having thus established his moral
superiority, he expands the definition to include the dams
on the Columbia River, which he insists are
“instruments of genocide, just as surely, explicitly, and intentionally
as the
gas chambers at Treblinka, Birkenau, and Auschwitz.” The pomposity and
self-righteousness are troubling in themselves, of course, but there are
also important factual questions that Jensen glosses over: Did the
homicidal gas
chambers actually exist? If so, why is there no forensic evidence of them? Why no
corroborating
archival
evidence? Why no photograph? Why so much crazy eyewitness testimony (no different in kind from that claiming that Jesus Christ literally rose from the dead)?

Jensen
doesn’t say, and apparently doesn't even suspect that such questions need to be asked. And if the “extermination”
was a result of the collapse of
Germany's Eastern Front after the battle of Stalingrad, don’t we need to
critique what started the war? Unfortunately, Jensen doesn't see the
need for doing this, since he believes in the cartoon-like view of
Hitler as a cosmic force that single-handedly mobilized tens of millions
of Germans to rush headlong to their doom. Sure.

Digging himself ever deeper,
Jensen advocates setting up a “Nuremberg-style
tribunal to try politicians, CEOs, generals, and capitalist journalists” for
crimes against nature and humanity. He recommends that U.S. generals read Robert Conot's, Justice At
Nuremberg, a standard work on the show trial, so
that they will know what “justice” awaits them when Jensen's
eco-warriors succeed "civilization."

Justice! Starving, dismembered
Germany, its cities bombed into rubble and its territory occupied by four foreign enemies that excluded their own crimes against humanity
from the hypocritical indictment they advanced against the defeated
"Reich," retroactively applying laws that had not existed at the time the hideous
German atrocities were committed. Some of this absurdity comes through
even in Conot's book, such as Hermann Goering bringing up Manifest
Destiny and the U.S. conquest of the Southwest on explicitly
white-supremacist principles, which the prosecutors don't even try to
refute.

To make a long story short, Jensen spews out all the myth-making minnows about
"progress" and "civilization," only to swallow the establishment's
ideological whale about unique Nazi racism culminating in mass extermination by gas
chambers. He then goes on to paint ordinary Americans today as Nazis by default for failing to stop the capitalist rush to irretrievable environmental catastrophe. It's hard to know which is the more pathetic, his slavish devotion to an establishment version of the facts, or his sweeping dismissal of Americans as being no better than endlessly caricatured "Good Germans."In any event, seeking
to rid the world of evil (like George Bush!), Jensen argues that violence in defense of mother earth is justified, just as killing Adolf Hitler would have been justified. Had
someone killed Hitler before WWII started, he claims, it would have
saved millions of lives, which implies that the war only occurred because of the
perverted will of a single individual. Obviously ludicrous, this is like arguing that if Thomas Edison's mother had aborted him
the world would never have had electricity. More relevantly, if the West
hadn't reacted hysterically to the Bolshevik revolution, Hitler never
would have been Hitler.

A
childhood rape victim, Jensen's analysis is essentially psychological
(abusers abuse without limit; victims are victimized without limit), and
sheds no light on society or history. Again and again, he opines that
fear to defend ourselves in the face of boundless abuse, not failure to
understand and dismantle the intricate mechanisms of oppression, is our central
problem. He appears frankly uninterested in thinking, which he does reluctantly and shoddily. For example, in attempting to counter the argument that focusing on especially appalling CEOs and corporations only leads the system to replace them with others equally bad, he misconstrues this as a form of fatalism. We would never call it pointless, he says, to arrest or kill an individual rapist on the grounds that other rapists will continue to rape. But the two situations are not at all comparable,
because there
is no structure of rapists as there is a structure of corporate power. CEOs perch
at the apex of profit pyramids that are legally required to maximize profit. No
rapist is under a legal obligation to rape. How can Jensen be unaware of this simple and highly relevant fact?

Worse than this, a deep cynicism pervades Jensen's thought, as he dismisses the vast majority of Americans as morally indifferent, if not depraved:

“I don’t think most people care, and I don’t think most
people will ever care. We can trot out whatever polls we want to try to prove
most Americans actually do care about the Environment, Justice, Sustainability
– that they care about anything beyond being left alone to numb themselves with
alcohol, cheap consumables, and television. . . . But the truth is that it’s just not that important to
most people – it in this case being
the survival of tigers, salmon, traditional indigenous peoples, oceans, rivers,
the earth; it also being justice,
fairness love, honesty, peace. If it were, ‘most people’ would do something
about it. . . . There will never be a mass awakening such that a majority of
Americans or even a significant minority will realize that we are destroying
our land base and rise up and stop it. Good Americans are just like Good
Germans." (End Game, Vol. 1, p. 341, 343) In short, only Jensen and the small circle of people he approves of are properly moral. This conclusion, offensive in itself, overlooks considerable counter-evidence within Jensen's own life span (he was born in 1960). When a relative handful of dedicated
political activists took up popular anti-war education in the 1960s
and 1970s, a highly indoctrinated U.S. population went from strongly
supporting the Vietnam slaughter to an 80% majority judging the war to
be "fundamentally wrong and immoral." In subsequent decades elements of
that overwhelming majority grew into a myriad of social change movements
raising issues of a depth and scope never even contemplated in the much
celebrated protest era of the 1960s.

True, ecological destruction has not been
stopped, or even slowed down, but given the massive concentration of
wealth and power at the top of society this was entirely predictable. If achievable at all, an
ecologically sane world of billions of people is not the work of decades,
but of centuries. The popular rebellions of the 1960s at least put the issue on
the map. The collective effort to avoid human extinction will define the
next two centuries, if we are lucky enough to have them. But no
technique or series of actions could have transformed the U.S. into an
ecologically sustainable society in a mere forty years. Nevertheless, Jensen is firm in his conviction that failure to achieve the impossible is evidence the American people are morally bankrupt.He, on the other hand, is of the ecologically Divine Elect, blessedly free of the stain of sin. Consider this phone conversation he reports having had with a friend:

“The phone rings. I answer. It’s a friend. She asks, ‘How
much longer do you think we’re going to be in Afghanistan?’

“She
can’t see this, but I look around, look outside at the redwood trees. I respond,
‘We’re in Afghanistan? I thought we were in northern California.

“Silence
on the phone. A sigh, and finally she says, ‘How much longer do you think our
troops are going to be in Afghanistan?’

“I
say, ‘I’ve got troops! Really? Will they do whatever I tell them? If I tell
them to take out the dams on the Columbia River will they do that?

“More
silence, until she says, ‘This is why I only call you every few weeks. I’ll be
in touch.’” (End Game, Vol. 1. pps. 175-6)

Here our sympathies must be with the friend, and not at all with Jensen. The meaning of her words is clear, her concerns appropriate, and her patience admirable. But Jensen cannot see any of this. Through adolescent mental gymnastics he has convinced himself he is not implicated in imperial crimes. He is not an American citizen, but a citizen of the eco-utopia to come. American troops are not his troops; they belong to a "civilization" of which he is not a part because he has recognized the call of the wild. The fact that the soldiers are Americans, paid by American tax dollars, graduates of American schools, residents of American communities, and intimately tied in a thousand other ways to Jensen and all other American citizens and long-term residents, does not matter. Jensen is a breed apart.And quite above the rest of us. In other words, there is not one human nature, but two: the mass of people are evil, while Jensen and a handful of heroic environmental radicals are good. And don't think Jensen will engage counter-argument on this amazing conclusion. On the rare occasions he anticipates contrary lines of thought, he slips into the sniveling tone of a juvenile delinquent: "Don't give me any shit." Or else he calls the reader stupid: “I was going to suggest those who think the U.S. invasion (of Iraq) has nothing to
do with oil should put the book down, but realized they’ve probably already
tired of the big words.” Sometimes he just surrenders to empty sneering: "I hope you're not going to suggest it would be immoral to take out television towers, that migratory songbirds should die so we can watch The Best Damn Sports Show, Period, on Fox Sports Net."

This from the "poet and philosopher" of the ecological movement. Barf.

A legend in his own mind, Jensen considers it an affront to have to carry a driver’s
license. Stopped by a police officer once and told to produce it, Jensen
replied that
licenses are essentially government “identity papers” which we are
“asked” to show at least as often as people were in those old black-and-white
movies of
the anti-Nazi resistance. The police officer in question told Jensen,
“If you
don’t like it, don’t drive,” a perfectly sensible response. No doubt Jensen thinks that having to produce a library card to check out books is just another Nazi plot to enslave us all.

Given such consistent irrationality, we shouldn't be surprised that Jensen is hostile to science, which he criticizes for having a "basis [in] prediction and extreme control." More specifically, he abhors “the neurotic insistence on repeatability (and control) in science, and the
insane exclusion of emotion – which means the exclusion of life – from both
science and economics.”

But control is only imposed in order to provide a valid basis for comparison, while repetition of results is a necessary defense against error. Emotion is excluded from the laboratory, but not from life itself, as scientists as a group experience the same range of emotions as everyone else. What has Jensen got against being reasonable?

Friday, February 16, 2018

"The West won the world not by the
superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in
applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners
never do”: Samuel P. Huntington

The
latest American slaughter of innocents - at home instead of abroad - has led to the usual
outpourings from political leaders expressing prayers and sympathy and then
switching to attacks on the evil weapons wielders that completely avoid the
social system relying on massive weapons production and their wielding by
military forces glorified for making wars.

The
bloody horror in Florida that took seventeen lives is known to everyone in the
USA but that same population is kept relatively ignorant of the bloody horror
being perpetrated everyday in Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and
Palestine/Israel – to mention only the Middle East – by people using the
armaments we sell them, when they’re not being used by our own military which
we train to use our weapons to kill people; foreigners, until further notice.

The
guilt tripping about guns belonging to individuals from what passes for
liberals and the protection of the right of individuals to have guns from what
passes for conservatives is the two-sides-of-the-same-coin debate that does
nothing to stop the massive profits of the weapons industry and the attempted
perpetuation of the empire represented by those profits.

The
military styled murder weapon used by the mentally troubled killer of innocents
in Florida is the same one used by allegedly normal military personnel to mass
murder innocent foreigners who are made to seem enemies and adversaries in the
same way the troubled Floridian may have seen his innocent victims. And the
nature of a society which has suicides increasing along with mass murders often
committed by the suicidal must be distracted by consciousness control which
highlights alleged deformities in individual character while protecting a
diseased social organism now devouring its own along with outside victims.

It is
much easier to feel the shock and pain when we see innocent americans suffering
at the hands of a usually mentally ill individual but the mind management that
keeps us from seeing the massive horrors that our social weapons problem
produces under the control of a mentally deranged political economics are never
dealt with in what passes for a debate between people manipulated to disrespect
one another instead of the system that manipulates them into an easy to control
divided population of identity groups that can’t possibly act as a democracy. This
even as that false definition of reality is driven through the skulls of both
into thinking what each has is democracy and the other threatens it. Honest
well meaning conservatives reduced to geeks confronted by sincere dedicated
liberals reduced to twits while the weapons makers continue banking hundreds of
billions and leave them clawing at one another with charges and countercharges
at a court owned and operated by the capitalist munitions industry.

The
guaranteed outcome of this demlib-repcon hissy fit form of politics is the continued
economics of mass murder when what we need is a united confrontation with the
minority power that needs to be replaced in order to save all and not just some
of the future victims. Until we do that, suicides, mass murders both foreign
and domestic, and further economic collapse are not merely threatened but
assured.

Friday, February 9, 2018

Hollywood came to a grinding shame-faced halt as new charges
of sexual abuse were leveled at stars like Angelina Jolie, Holly Berry,
Jennifer Lawrence and Helen Mirren.

Not them, actually, but others very much
like them.

“She pawed at me, breathed heavily down my neck and
whispered off color remarks to me when I delivered her lunch” said the first
anonymous accuser. Another claimed that a beautiful star asked him for a
rubdown and spit at him when he blushingly refused. Both have been in therapy
ever since and resolve to sue for all their mental care and inability to gain
employment after these shocking experiences.

A third damaged soul said that he at first thought she was
joking when a breathtakingly gorgeous star begged him to lick her feet while
she read her mail. His religious teachings forbade any such behavior on his
part and he never delivered mail to her or anyone else again, forfeiting a
career at the Post Office.

After further investigation, and reading top-secret memos
shared between the accusers and the revealing agency which were hacked, leaked
or stolen by Russian agents, Legalienate now discounts all these claims. We
learned that the SWTMOA, the organization that first made the charges, is
Sexual Wishful Thinking Men Of America and might possibly be less than even
handed in accepting far-fetched and remotely believable charges.

We are forwarding the results of this story to all major
media, beginning with the New York Times and ending with Fox News, in the hope
that they might follow through on checking the objectivity of sources before reporting hysterical fables,
political lies , treacherous fictions and purposely divisive slanders as :

Monday, February 5, 2018

Depending on whether the science
is materially based religious or religiously based immaterialist, we’ve been
around for more than 100,000 years originating in Africa and in a form close to
our current bi-pedal carbon based creatures of hopefully advancing
consciousness. Some estimate capitalism may have roots in biblical times,
though most agree that the industrial form from which present reality evolved
began in the 17th century and came to full domination of the globe
in the 19th. Clearly, humans have been through a multitude of social,
anti-social, communal, anti-communal, organized and disorganized methods of
species continuity as can be imagined since our origins. That recent capitalist
history of maybe 500 years, a very tiny fraction of the time we’ve been around,
based on a foundation of private profit motivation can represent the highest
point of human progress attainable is most obvious to confused people with
objectively opposing thumbs but subjectively empty heads, even while possessing
overstocked arsenals of the most murderous weapons ever created.

Such people – sadly, all of us who allow a rich royal minority to rule – have reached a point of
endangering our race in the most menacing way known, at least to recorded
history under whatever system of domination controlled the history writers. It
is likely a frozen earth that became a watery earth that became a drier earth and
cradle of something called civilization experienced many cataclysmic disasters,
but most of those happened l0ng before humans were around and certainly not in
our present form. But our supposedly highest developed animal ruler of the planet status
has brought us to a crisis which demands the race and the place we call home no
longer tolerate minority rule of the royal rich and take on the emancipating
burden of creating a system of democratic rule dependent on as many of us as
possible before all of us suffer catastrophe. We may survive for many more
millennia, but without radical change in the organization of our lives, that may
be as something other than the human race as we know it now. And good, sublime,
bad or worse, that’s all we know and what we ought to care about saving for
just that reason. Transforming capitalism into a humanitarian democratic system
previously unknown to humans may not solve all our problems but it will
definitely solve most of them, especially the most threatening to our only-one-in existence race.

America recently celebrated a
great leader but organized by our rulers to narrow the broad scope of his social
criticism and fit it into a non-threatening form which has reduced him to an
almost mythic figure celebrated for only one aspect of his charge to the nation
by exclusion of his larger message. When Martin Luther King began publicly
expressing his criticism of the capitalist system by saying things like this he
may have signed his death warrant.

“…the evils of racism, economic exploitation and
militarism are all tied together…you can’t get rid of one without getting rid
of the others…Why are
there forty million poor people in America? When you ask that question…you are
questioning the capitalist economy.”

These days it isn’t as dangerous to make such statements but
sadly no public figure with the stature of a King is yet offering leadership
for system change. Bernie Sanders struck some fear into fundamentalist
capitalism with his call for a return to the social democratic capitalism of
the post world war two “new deal”, but the owners and operators of the nation
were far more concerned about one of their own taking power. Thus the ongoing
assault on Trump, deemed far too unbalanced and outspoken in his egotistical
dedication to the greed and disregard for humanity that must be smothered in
platitudes such as offered by the Clinton- Bush-Obama servants to empire in
order to be accepted by the people under a wealthy minority’s consciousness
control apparatus of mind managed surreality.

But the short comings of an
anti-democratic system ruled by a minority but passing for a democracy among
those subdued into calling junk food a gourmet diet and mass murder a
humanitarian policy are piling up faster and in such deadly fashion that many
are beginning to act in opposition like a united race and not a divided group of market
clones programmed to think that people who have different skin tones or sexes
are actually members of a race other than human. That large divisive force
among people, created by their rulers to keep them apart, continues to menace
but as King and others long, long before him understood*, it cannot be changed
in isolation but only as part of a larger change in the system that created
that lie – and many others - to separate us from one another.

*“The emancipation of the
producing class involves all human beings without distinctions of sex and race”
Karl Marx

There is no race but human, with
cultural, physical, genetic, geographic and national differences among us but
none as significant as those between the sexes which are absolutely necessary
for the perpetuation of the race, present marketing standards to the contrary.
Same sex love is probably as old as humanity, but the perpetuation of the race
demands opposite sex coitus, even if reduced to purchasing anonymous sperm or
renting an unknown womb. Capital has reduced all human relations to market forms
of commodity consumption, including birth, death, marriage and divorce, which
all play a major shopping-buying-selling role in happening and un-happening.
Love can – and should -be beautiful but just as love for a pet cannot produce a
human, love for the same sex can be poetic and spiritual, but no more capable
of producing new life than a man falling in love with a refrigerator or a woman
having an affair with a can opener. It can be said that the capitalist market
has advanced humanity in this area by making same sex love a product-commodity
now finally in the open, but it can also be said that capitalism played a, if
not the, major role in forcing such love into the shadows in the first place.

It is highly doubtful that our
earliest ancestors were much concerned about who loved whom and how or why,
given the far more important survival needs for food and shelter. The need
for those things are still absolutely essential, and they are becoming more
difficult for many to acquire in a world where a handful of billionaires own
and control more wealth than several billion of us put together. And whether
those billions are light or dark skinned, male, female, tall, short or other,
we are all members of a human race which must come together to transform reality,
not just for some of us but for all, with much less regard for real, implied or
frequently imagined differences between us. The ocean on which we sail is
dangerously poisoned by capital and our crippled ship is in danger of going
down into that muck, whether we are among the minority profiteers or majority losers. We sink
or swim together or not at all. That means confrontation with, and
transformation of the system that is the major cause of the pollution of that
ocean and our minds. And as someone once said long ago, Das Kapital.

Thursday, January 25, 2018

Capitalism, the globalised economic system that has ruled
the world for hundreds of years, seems to have entered a stage of steadily
expanding and faster collapse than is usually the case nationally, let alone on
a global basis, though this is hardly dealt with by any news or commentary in
the capitalist world. And since there is no other world but that, how can
anyone arrive at such a conclusion? Possibly by paying closer attention to the
material reality of that system rather than continuing to accept a religious theory
about it that only makes sense in the way the divine birth and resurrection of
Jesus, Moses being in direct contact with, and Mohamed being directly contacted
by, the deity, and other foundation myths of the Abrahamic legends which, however minority created and preached still make sense for billions of people.
Faith can be our salvation at times, but as an ex-clergy member has said, only
gravity works all the time. Groups of humans calling themselves secular and science based
who still accept private profit in a market place as the Credo in
Unum Deum are frequently much closer to religious fundamentalists in accepting as foundational universal truths the material results of earth, air, water, fire and humans being treated as market
commodities .

This political economic system has been incredibly rewarding
to much of humanity, while causing untold suffering and devastation for a
majority who have been forced to absorb the loss so that others might
profit. Even the Abrahamic faiths contain teachings and proposed actions that
work against the acceptance of poverty, wealth, and the collection of interest.
Islam does not allow interest collecting, or at least tries to forbid it before banking and finance
make it nearly impossible, and Christianity once forbade it completely. In
fact, one of the Jesus stories has it that he and his
radical band of rabbis attacked the moneychangers and moneylenders at the temple. Whether
they did so because it was seen as evil in and of itself or only so if taking
place at the temple is up to the interpreters, but there might be a lesson
there that humans, at least some of us, were in open rebellion against minority profiteers
even while the groundwork was being laid to make religious teachings the
handmaidens of capital at its earliest stages.

Presently, while an american elite is trying and seems
almost successful in hysterically mobilizing a defense of the system by
attacking the reckless if honest pinhead who won the presidency despite all the
owners of the nation’s political process did to prevent it, the signs of breakdown are not just mental for those who can afford it but more physical for
those unable to find solace through therapy, drugs, religion, or as John Lennon
once put, through sex and tv. The marketing of aspects of this breakdown are
further signs of its desperation, but also its malevolent power to cloud
people’s minds in myth, legend, propaganda and lies, through the “branding” of
manifestations of its deadly flaws with product names like “climate change” and “military defense”, the first an aspect of capitalism
treated as a mysterious aspect of “our” treatment of nature, the second
a much older enforcer of minority power now, in a nuclear age, threatening all
life on earth rather than simply those of one or another people or nation.

While the evidence of breakdown is global, the source of the
political economic power that has brought it about is regionally western and specifically
American, though certainly not uniquely so as newer entrants into the
capitalist market madness are part of the problem, though not nearly as
menacing as the originals. Russia, and even more so China, are creating
inequality and destroying the environment in the necessary fashion in order to
create great wealth for some while robbing others, but their approach is
relatively progressive, to use an overworked word loved by liberals, by
comparison to the powers that have brought us closer to world disaster in their
terrible treatment of people and earth itself. The global realities of capitalism that shrank
the world of numerous nations into one of a massive market, spoken of by Marx and Engels
more than 150 years ago, have become the global mall in which workers are
dumped from one nation to another based on the financial loss of keeping them in one
place or profiting from their cheap labor in another, have become massive
problems of relocation and misery for some and wealth and profits beyond belief
for a tiny minority of the planet’s people. This is tearing nations apart as it
adds to the divisions of manipulated populations into fighting one another over
seemingly diminishing wealth, under capitalist“austerity”, a process which is only applied to and
experienced by common working people – the overwhelming majority – while
incredible wealth beyond what past charlatans and hustlers called royalty once
amassed creates a sub-market for excessive riches which trickle down to their
servant class as money for their pets. When a civilization (?) is reduced to
spending more on war and domestic animals than it does on the well being of some, really most
of its humans, globally, blaming that on lazy workers can only cover reality for so
long, even among a people fed a diet of fast food, fake news, and political
lies. Humanity has not survived and evolved for millennia to wind up vanishing
due to a political economic system calling itself democratic, which is like
calling rape an act of love. Although it can look that way if we only peek at
material reality behind blinders and wearing head phones which allow
only news of the most trivial, useless, consumptive and bestial products to
seep through. We are better than that and need to begin acting like it before ruling minorities bring us, and everything else, to a crashing end. Can we?